A chemist’s guide to optimism

Not all science is equal in the sustainability stakes. Chemistry’s track record is thoroughly mixed. And according to some, it’s now becoming something of a “monster under the bed” in environmentalism. But as Ellen Phiddian reports, a new generation of chemists are still focused on solving problems – but now they’re going clean and green as well.

I am the sort of fool who bets against rain in the tropics. I decided not to pack a raincoat or an umbrella on this trip to Cairns; now, it’s day one and I’m faced with crossing town on foot in a downpour.

Fortunately, there’s an open supermarket right near my hotel, with a rack of foldable umbrellas next to the door. I buy one for $10. It keeps me and my laptop dry for the next four blocks.

It occurs to me as I reach my destination that rocking up to a sustainability conference with a brand-new, mostly plastic umbrella – the third such one I own – is perhaps a worse look than turning up soaking wet. I pull the tag off surreptitiously, and notice that there’s a small tear in the umbrella canopy where it had been punched through. So it’s also on its way to disposable.

Over the next three days, my umbrella becomes something of an albatross, dangling from my wrist. I’m in Cairns to cover the first Australian Conference on Green and Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering: several hundred people gathering to discuss how chemistry can make the world sustainable. The crowd is mostly research chemists, but there are also engineers, patent attorneys, industry reps – anyone who works with molecules is welcome.

“So many of the biggest environmental challenges – recycling, carbon dioxide, energy storage, monitoring – fall within the domain of chemistry.”

The fact that it’s happening at all is surprising to some. Chemistry is a filthy science. It’s a discipline that evolved from alchemists in smoking laboratories, changing their greedy fascination with gold and immortality into a systematic fascination with money and health. And according to some of the attendees, it’s now become something of the “monster under the bed” in environmentalism.

Chemistry’s track record is thoroughly mixed. In the past century, chemists have turned air into ammonia, and then fertilisers and chemical weaponry. They’ve invented molecules that become life-saving medications, which large companies sell at high cost to make huge profit. They’ve spun carbon atoms into plastics that facilitate every aspect of modern life, and choke the oceans. And they haven’t always been as enthusiastic as other scientists about sustainability.

“When Rachel Carson started the whole environmental movement with Silent Spring, I think the chemical community did a poor job embracing that process,” Dr John Warner, one of the conference headliners, tells me.

I’ve met Warner with his long-time collaborator and the other conference headliner, Professor Paul Anastas, in a humid corridor during the “one half-hour” they both have free. But neither of them act like they’re in a hurry.

They also keep quoting each other while we speak. They’re childhood friends, from the same town in Massachusetts, who have now been working with each other for decades. And at the start of their careers, they watched chemists distance themselves from the environmental movement. According to Warner, the decades following the 1960s saw chemists double down on their craft, and ignore its effects. Anastas believes that by the early 1990s, “everybody but the chemist” was trying to solve environmental problems.

“The chemists only had one role in the early ’90s, and that was to measure how bad the pollution was,” he says. For these two, it seemed absurd. So many of the biggest environmental challenges – recycling, carbon dioxide, energy storage, monitoring – fall within the domain of chemistry.

“The people with the most power, the most influence, the most ability to actually change this equation, weren’t involved,” says Anastas.

But there were enough interested chemists to start a movement: green chemistry. Warner and Anastas spearheaded its growth in the US, publishing Green Chemistry in 1998. In it, they outlined 12 principles (right) for chemists to follow when doing their work. Instead of just focusing on the final product, made as cheaply as possible, green chemists begin by considering each of these principles.

It’s hard work. But Warner, with over 300 patents to his name, reckons it hasn’t slowed him down. In fact, done properly, he believes green chemistry saves money and time. No one throws resources into research and development, only to find their promising new reaction uses a solvent that’s slightly too toxic when it hits the manufacturing wing. No one spends millions in litigation or redesigning when people and governments find their practices are polluting waterways.

“Had that first chemist understood green chemistry – not always, things are still going to slip through the cracks – but there is a much better chance that […] they will avoid those profound mistakes that become very costly to industry,” he says.

One of Warner’s inventions is a way to dodge hair dyes, many of which are toxic to the waterways they end up in. Warner’s treatment, derived from velvet beans and called Hairprint, uses melanin instead. As we age, the melanocytes in our scalps stop making melanin, the pigment that gives our hair its colour. Hairprint returns that melanin – and because it originally sat in our hair, it’s incorporated back in the same way, resulting in the same colour one’s hair originally was. For now, it only works with eumelanin, which yields black or brown hair – sorry, pheomelanin-stacked redheads and blondes.

Warner was the first person to try his hair treatment. Similarly, he dug up his own driveway to test a new asphalt binder. The non-toxic, environmentally friendly substance undoes the hardening oxidation reaction that asphalt undergoes while it’s sitting in our roads – making it soft and easy to re-use. Now sold as Delta S, the binder lets road builders re-use much more of their old asphalt.

Neither of these products is perfect. Warner hasn’t yet made something that addresses all 12 principles. “Right now, there are people dying of cancer,” he says. “If I can get to market stopping this thing from being a carcinogen, and it’s still not the most biodegradable, that’s the way science works.”

Anastas has spent more of his time with the US Environmental Protection Agency, but there are a few inventions that bear his stamp. One of his PhD students, Stafford Sheehan, has developed a process of particular note: it reacts CO₂ with hydrogen, forming a mixture of alcohols, water and a class of chemicals called alkanes.

This has now spun out into a business called Air Company, which takes CO₂ captured from industrial plants and turns it into vodka, hand sanitiser and perfume. For now, the goods are small fry – but Air Company plans to make jet fuel. Given jet fuel pumps CO₂ straight back into the atmosphere once it’s burned, this would be circular rather than carbon-negative – but it’s certainly an improvement on our current, one-way fuel.

The challenge, now, is to get everyone else on this wavelength. Green chemistry has flourished in the past 25 years, but it’s not yet the standard.

“It is a paradigm shift. But I’d like to believe that it’s an evolution as opposed to a revolution,” says Warner.

“Evolution’s good. Revelation’s better,” says Anastas.

Both Anastas and Warner understand that they need to take other chemists with them. It’s why, when Professor Colin Raston wrote to them in the late 1990s about starting the Australian green chemistry movement, they got back in touch promptly to lend their expertise. A quarter of a century later, they’ve given up their 4th of July celebrations to come to a rainy Cairns and speak at the conference Raston is co-chairing. Shut in from the rain, the venue is warm, dark and damp: perfect for fermenting ideas.

A handful of inventions from two chemists – even really brilliant ones – won’t stave off environmental destruction. But thousands of inventions, from people all over the world? That’s got potential. This is why Warner thinks the most important thing now is to change chemistry education.

“If we change education, there’s enough diversity of people that can go out there and start solving problems. And I don’t have to prioritise, because we get them all,” he says.

Doing the right thing

After I’ve finished speaking with Warner and Anastas, I realise my new umbrella is missing. I find it in one of the conference rooms: it had rolled under a chair I was sitting on a few hours earlier.

The person who made its handle didn’t care about the person who made its canopy. They don’t fit together – it’s awkward and loose. The person who attached the price tag to it didn’t care that they were puncturing the fabric. None of them cared about me, struggling to keep this bad umbrella stable in a storm that evening. And I didn’t care about any of them, or I would have spent more than $10 in the first place, and kept a closer eye on it.

Professor Edward Buckingham, now director of engagement at Monash University’s business school, is familiar with these chains of apathy. Buckingham has the air of a polymath – he quotes everyone from Machiavelli, to Marx, to Manuel (the young man he was speaking to when I approached him for an interview). He started his career as a materials scientist, and was running a manufacturing line in France when he started to change his mind about chemistry.

“We made the tubes and the stoppers that effervescent tablets come in, and we consumed about 18 tonnes of polymer every day: mostly polypropylene, but polyethylene and a little bit of polystyrene as well,” he says.

“I was walking in the forest of Fontainebleau near my home, which is a forest just south of Paris. And I found one of my tubes lying in the leaves. That upset me, because I thought: that’s where my product ends up. We don’t recycle it.”

He took it to his boss, who dismissed him – saying their company’s pollution was insignificant compared to others, and the tubes made people’s lives more convenient. It started Buckingham thinking about what a limited role he had, where his primary goal was efficiency.

“There’s this trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness,” says Buckingham. Efficiency, he says, quoting management author Peter Drucker’s definition, is “doing things right” – while effectiveness is “doing the right thing”.

“What happens further down the value chain to the product that I produce? What happens when it combines with other products and creates some unintended consequences? Efficiency doesn’t deal with that.”

Buckingham is now an ethnographer, but he still runs workshops on business design for budding scientists – having started in sciences, the field isn’t foreign to him. He’s at this conference to try and get pure chemists thinking about how industry sees their work, and hear the chemists’ perspectives.

One of those chemists is Professor Maria Forsyth, from Deakin University, who works on one of the most ubiquitous and problematic pieces of chemistry on the planet.

Lithium, as the lightest metal, is undeniably the easiest way to make a powerful battery. It’s hard to imagine electric vehicles or phones made with anything other than lithium-ion batteries. But in situations where weight isn’t as crucial – like a home or grid-scale battery, or even an electric lawnmower – we don’t need to use such a scarce resource. Abundant sodium, sitting just below lithium on the periodic table, shares many of its features for a much lower price.

“If you can have a manufacturing plant that can make lithium-ion batteries, you can swap in sodium-ion batteries,” Forsyth says.

Forsyth is rushing to get things done right. In a 40-minute presentation to the conference, she packs in enough information to fill six undergrad­uate lectures on sodium-ion batteries. She goes even faster to get more words in when I interview her: I need more of the technical stuff explained in detail.

Sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries share all the same parts, but the chemical makeup of those parts is different. This is why sodium-ion batteries are still, for now, only buyable for specialist applications: chemists haven’t optimised them yet. Forsyth believes we’re about five years out from full commercialisation – and that the batteries can be optimised in more than just price.

“We have an opportunity to make the devices that we make more sustainable, and more easily recyclable,” she says.

Take the battery anode, which supplies electrons in one half of the battery. In lithium-ion batteries, the anode is typically made of graphite. Sodium doesn’t play as nicely with graphite – the atoms are too big – but it does work with another form of carbon, called hard carbon, which can be made from junk: waste biomass. Forsyth and colleagues have been toying with anodes made from biochar, green waste and even unwanted textiles.

“It’s a philosophical shift: instead of making something as efficient as possible, make something as effective as possible.”

Then there’s the current collectors, which connect the anodes and cathodes with the outer ­circuits. Lithium needs both copper and aluminium in its current collectors, but sodium can use just recyclable aluminium. Or electrolytes, which transfer positive ions within the battery. Forsyth and colleagues are designing solid-state electrolytes for sodium batteries, which will be safer and therefore much less energy- and time-intensive to manufacture.

Forsyth wants to see onshore battery manufacturing in Australia – but she says we should “think about what we’re doing” first. Once an industry is established, it’s much harder to change it to be sustainable.

“One of the things that drives me at the moment is making sure that what we create now doesn’t create a problem for the next generation,” she says.

For Buckingham, paradigm shift is about perspective – and getting other people to see things from your line of sight.

“It’s being able to reposition yourself in order to see a pathway through,” he says. “That’s what a paradigm shift is all about. Now, very often, you sail off down that street on your own, [and] no one else follows.”

So it’s crucial to get people from different backgrounds talking – and listening – to each other. If the chatter is anything to go by, the conference is a roaring success. People are swapping notes on their posters, figuring out where their research fits together and asking keenly after each others’ breakthroughs. Everyone keeps talking about the prevalence of PhD students and early-career researchers. These young chemists don’t have the same confidence as their supervisors, but they’re enthusiastic and clear: however their careers unfold, they know sustainability will dictate them.

At the conference dinner, an impromptu dance party starts. The senior academics lead it off, but – once enough of them have been coaxed to join – the younger crowd dances the longest.

Big-picture thinking

Prior to green chemistry, chemists were not monolithically careless about the environment. There were always concerned people who tried to minimise the effects of what they were doing. Professor Qin Li, an environmental engineer at Griffith University who is co-chairing the conference with Raston, knows this well: her late father was a chemistry professor who worked with paints.

“He was always telling me, ‘Oh, this is, toxic, don’t touch that.’ When we had fruits and vegetables, I was always made aware of the pesticides on the surface,” she says.

“Green chemistry is something in my veins.”

Li’s own research on particle movement started to get seriously environmental after her PhD, when she was looking at groundwater and aquifer recharge, and how her particle technology could improve clogging. She’s carried this interest in water through her career – I catch her just after a breakfast workshop, where she and a dozen others have been discussing ways to repurpose wastewater.

“Where I think it is a paradigm shift is in asking the people who come up with the recipe to think in a holistic way, in a multi-dimensional sphere,” she says. “They really need to look at: okay, it’s not only just about removing dirt, but also about after removing the dirt. What happens to that surfactant? Because if it’s going to end up in the environment, then it will also come back to us.”

A future of solutions

The hotel tells me they have no use for my umbrella, so I stuff it into a coat pocket and take it on the flight home. On the plane, I draw up a plan for it based on things I’ve heard or seen at the conference.

The aluminium stretchers are simple to deal with – aluminium is almost as easy to recycle as it is to mine, and much less carbon-intensive. They’ll be separated out and melted down, as will the steel in the springs. The fabric, probably polyester, can be burned into hard carbon, which could become the anode for a sodium-ion battery. This process still releases some CO₂, but that could be captured and added to Air Company’s vodka. The hard plastic is trickier. I could use some sort of catalyst that breaks the polymers down (preferably not a heavy metal) – once broken, they could become carbon-based catalysts themselves.

I’m being flippant, designing this plan for 200 grams of plastic when I’m on a machine emitting several kilograms of CO₂ each second. But fixing the problem of jet fuel won’t fix the problem of my junk umbrella, either. The path to a sustainable future is paved with several thousand small solutions.

They might be alchemists, but chemists have also always been crafters. They make molecules. For decades, these molecules have had one job: to do something as efficiently as possible. Now, more and more chemists are starting to think about everything else that happens to their molecules. Do they break down in the environment? Is there waste involved in making them? What else might they affect?

It’s in the interests of both chemists and the companies they work for to start crafting molecules in this paradigm. Otherwise, they’re betting against the rain: packing their hyper-efficient materials into a suitcase and thinking, foolishly, that the climate won’t interfere. If more and more chemists are making things sustainably, the old methods will become, well, unsustainable.

“We just laugh, or cry, when people say, ‘Oh, chemistry is a mature field’,” says Anastas.

“It is so nascent. It is at the beginning of its potential.”